Ink & Ingredients
Where the story and the food are never separate.
Part of The People's Kitchen · Monthly · Rotating Durham Venues
This Month’s Pick!
A Love Letter to Food & Ambition
Friday, July 24th | 6:00 PM Daughters Coffee and Books - $60 per person
Some books light a fire under you. This one brings the heat — and we're channeling every bit of it into the kitchen.
This month, Ink & Ingredients is gathering around Can't Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan — a bold, electric story about going after what you want and never apologizing for it. We're pairing it with the coziest power move in the culinary playbook: Breakfast for Dinner. We're talking eggs, pancakes, and all the good energy that comes with flipping something simple into something special.
And because ambition doesn't stop when the night does — you're taking home your own shelf-stable pancake mix so you can bring the magic back to your own kitchen, any morning you choose.
Hands-on Breakfast for Dinner cooking experience — eggs & pancakes made together
Guided book reflection and discussion around Can't Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan
Custom bookmarks to take home
Session packet to guide your experience and keep the conversation going
Shelf-stable pancake mix to take home — just add water
Exclusive goodies from author Kennedy Ryan
Try Hendrick’s Honey latte from the book!
Come ready to read, eat, and leave inspired.
Diving into Black Women Stories!
Need the book?
Every book has a flavor.
Every meal has a story. Ink & Ingredients is a monthly gathering where Black women authors and culinary experiences work together to nourish body, mind, and spirit. Each session pairs close reading with a food experience tied to the themes of the book — sometimes we cook, sometimes we dine, sometimes we simply gather and taste. The format shifts. The intention doesn't.
Because cooking doesn't start at the pan. It starts with how we think, what we read, and what we allow ourselves to imagine. And a story read in community, paired with food made with intention, becomes something you carry differently than a story read alone.
This is that experience. Monthly. In Durham. For you.
What a Session Looks Like
Each Ink & Ingredients gathering is built around a featured book by a Black woman author — chosen for the richness of its themes, the power of its language, and the culinary or sensory experiences it opens up.
Before we gather, you read. When we gather, we go deeper — into the text, into the food, into the conversation that lives at the intersection of the two. Sessions rotate across Durham venues that fit the spirit of the book: a dinner, a tasting, an evening in a bookshop, a gathering in a garden.
No two sessions look the same. All of them feel like something you needed.
The Book & The Bite
How we pair them
The food at Ink & Ingredients is never decorative. It is always an extension of the text — a flavor that echoes a theme, a dish that honors a character's culture, a recipe that lives inside the world of the book. Sometimes the connection is literal. Sometimes it is emotional. It is always intentional.
Because the story and the food are one, one is always an extension of the other.
The Conversation
Ink & Ingredients is not a book club where you report on what you read. It is a gathering where you share what moved you — and where someone else's response to the same page opens something new in you.
Sessions are facilitated with intention and warmth, creating space for the kind of conversation that doesn't happen everywhere: about Black women's writing, about food and identity, about what it means to nourish yourself and be nourished by a community of people who showed up to do the same thing.
Come ready to read. Come ready to eat. Come ready to be in community.
Upcoming Sessions
Sessions rotate monthly. Venues, books, and formats vary.
Don't want to miss a gathering? Join the Ink & Ingredients list and we'll come to you.
Need The Book?
A Love Letter to Food & Ambition
Friday, July 24th | 6:00 PM Daughters Coffee and Books - $60 per person
Some books light a fire under you. This one brings the heat — and we're channeling every bit of it into the kitchen.
This month, Ink & Ingredients is gathering around Can't Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan — a bold, electric story about going after what you want and never apologizing for it. We're pairing it with the coziest power move in the culinary playbook: Breakfast for Dinner. We're talking eggs, pancakes, and all the good energy that comes with flipping something simple into something special.
And because ambition doesn't stop when the night does — you're taking home your own shelf-stable pancake mix so you can bring the magic back to your own kitchen, any morning you choose.
Hands-on Breakfast for Dinner cooking experience — eggs & pancakes made together
Guided book reflection and discussion around Can't Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan
Custom bookmarks to take home
Session packet to guide your experience and keep the conversation going
Shelf-stable pancake mix to take home — just add water
Exclusive goodies from author Kennedy Ryan
Try Hendrick’s Honey latte from the book!
Come ready to read, eat, and leave inspired.
A Love Letter to Home & Handmade
August 28th | 6:00 PM | Location TBD - $60 per person
Some stories aren't about grand gestures — they're about the quiet, complicated love that lives in a family. This month, we're getting our hands doughy for it.
Ink & Ingredients is diving into We Don't Talk About Carol by Kristen L. Berry , a gripping novel about buried family secrets and the truths we inherit. We're pairing it with a hands-on Ravioli-Making experience, because nothing says "labor of love" quite like folding pasta by hand, one pocket at a time.
Hands-on Ravioli-Making experience: dough, filling, and folding from scratch
Guided book reflection and discussion around We Don't Talk About Carol
Custom bookmarks to take home
Session packet to guide your experience and keep the conversation going
You’re snagging a recipe card
Some fun challenges along the way
Come ready to read, roll, and uncover something new.
A Love Letter to Heritage & Home Cooking
September 20th | 5:00 PM | Orenge South Durham | $60 per person
Some recipes are never written down, they live in memory, in hands, in the stories passed at the stove. This month, we're changing that.
We're gathering around Harlem Rhapsody by Victoria Christopher Murray, a novel steeped in legacy, ambition, and the Harlem Renaissance, and pairing it with a Recipe Writing experience. Bring a family recipe (written down or memorized) and we'll help you start the process of putting it to paper, so it's never lost.
Guided Recipe Writing workshop, bring a family recipe to document
Guided book reflection and discussion around Harlem Rhapsody
Custom bookmarks to take home
Session packet to guide your experience and keep the conversation going
Start of your own family recipe book, yours to keep and build on
We are having wine & charcuterie
Come ready to read, remember, and write down what matters.
A Love Letter to What Runs Thick
October 24th | 7:00 PM | The Durham Hotel | $60 per person
Some secrets don't stay buried, they thicken, they pool, they rise to the surface. This month, we're getting into the science (and the danger) of it all.
We're reading My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, a darkly funny, unsettling story about loyalty, family, and just how far "blood is thicker than water" really goes. We're pairing it with a Viscosity Lesson: Blood Is Thicker Than Water, where we'll build a layered cocktail (or mocktail) using ingredients of different densities, watching them separate and settle in real time, just like the secrets in the book.
Hands-on layered cocktail/mocktail demo exploring density and viscosity
Guided book reflection and discussion around My Sister, the Serial Killer
Custom bookmarks to take home
Session packet to guide your experience and keep the conversation going
2 drinks + food included with your ticket
Come ready to read, sip, and see what rises to the top.
Not Local? Join Our Mail Club
Sealed & Seasoned Mail Club
Ink & Ingredients — delivered to your door.
Can't make it to Durham? Want to go even deeper between gatherings? The Sealed & Seasoned Mail Club brings Ink & Ingredients directly into your home — a curated mailer that arrives before each monthly session, designed to immerse you in the book and the flavors before you ever sit down at the table.
What's Inside Every Mailer
A Love Letter Each packet opens with a love letter — written in the format A Love Letter to [theme] and [theme] Based on [Book] — a meditation on the text that opens up the themes, the flavors, and the questions we'll be sitting with together. The letter you read before the gathering that makes the gathering richer.
Deep Dive Reading Packet Our curated companion to the book — additional context, passages worth revisiting, discussion threads, and the questions that connect the text to food, identity, and community. The material we make for our in-person sessions, sent directly to you.
Custom Bookmark Designed for each book. A piece of the Ink & Ingredients world you keep long after the session ends.
Recipe Card The recipe connected to this month's book — developed by Kind Kitchen Group, tied to the themes of the text, and designed to be made in your own kitchen. Cook the story. Taste what we're reading.
Book Rating Page A beautifully designed page for your own notes, reactions, and ratings — because your response to the book matters and deserves somewhere to live.
Who It's For
The Sealed & Seasoned Mail Club is for the reader who wants more. The one who lives outside Durham but wants to be part of this community. The one who attends every session and wants to go deeper between them. The one who discovered Ink & Ingredients and immediately wanted to bring it home.
It is for anyone who believes that a book and a meal, taken together, can change how you see the world.
$12
A Month
Rotating Venues
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An independent Durham bookstore built around literature and community gathering. A natural home for Ink & Ingredients and a space that understands exactly what this work is about.
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A co-working space built around community voice and shared experience, Orenge Durham is a natural home for the kind of gathering Ink & Ingredients is designed to be. When we meet at Orenge, we're not just borrowing a room — we're stepping into a space that already believes what we believe: that community is built through showing up together, that every voice belongs in the room, and that the spaces we gather in shape what becomes possible. The conversation always goes deeper here.
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A venue that brings elegance and Durham pride together. Sessions at The Durham Hotel carry a particular sense of occasion — the feeling that what we're doing here is worth dressing for.